Warriors CEO Cameron George says that 2020 will be remembered as the year 'that made us as a club'.
Toward the back end of the 2020 season, the Warriors began to find their way.
After dropping eight of their first 11 games, they finished the year with eight wins to their name and until the dying stages of the competition were a chance of making the playoffs.
Former interimcoach Todd Payten unlocked something in the team that hadn't been seen for some time and, despite the troubles the season presented, it was just the third time in the last six seasons the team won at least 40 per cent of their games.
It's a nice platform for the club to build upon for incoming coach Nathan Brown, who told the Herald that, despite how successful his predecessor was, there was no additional pressure on him based on the results of last year.
"On any given watch, whether a coach departs or stays, there's always some stuff happening at the clubs that are good. The challenge is to work out what changes you want to make that you feel are going to help the club grow the most and what sort of things are happening that you continue," Brown explained.
"We all have expectations anyway as coaches, regardless. I've taken over clubs that are last, when I went to St Helens they finished a game short of the Grand Final, so your expectations have to be realistic, but they have to be high. Regardless of how things happened last year, it's not going to change really on my thoughts.
"My biggest long-term goal here is for the club to become a consistent finals team. If we can become a consistent finals team, and do that long enough and well enough, that's when you generally get to the promised land of winning a Grand Final.
"At the end of the day, we're all in the business for the same reasons – we want to win, but to do that you have to get certain things right along the way and you've certainly got some building blocks on the way. To be a Grand Final team, playing finals consistently is something you need to do. Big games are about practise and you have to get there to practise."
Warriors head coach Nathan Brown has arrived in New Zealand to being preseason work ahead of the 2021 NRL season. Photo / Photosport
Brown isn't a totally new entity to the Warriors environment, having worked with the club early last season in a consulting role. There will, however, be a number of players who are yet to work with the New South Wales native after the club's recent signing spree which saw them land the likes of damaging forwards Addin Fonua-Blake and Ben Murdoch-Masila, and veteran backs Euan Aitken and Marcelo Montoya.
However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Warriors have been forced to set up bases in both New Zealand and Australia for players to do pre-season work at, meaning Brown won't get a good gauge of his full squad until early next year.
It's something the club has had to plan around, but Brown praised the club's planning both in that aspect and in how to approach the player market, in which they have had some rare success.
"I was quite aware they had a plan in place, and anytime someone's got a plan in place, they give themselves a reasonable plan of doing okay in the recruitment market," Brown explained.
"There were some players signed before I came which are certainly going to help the squad improve; we've added a few more since then and obviously the younger players that have started to play in the last 18 months, we're quite hopeful of them growing and becoming better players.
"Recruitment at the end of the day is the lifeline of any coach. All the old great coaches like Jack Gibson and Wayne Bennett have always said the best recruiters are the ones that generally win some footy games, so hopefully we got that right."
"We got a fair bit of planning done. Like all clubs, there's a fair bit of planning that goes into the season. For us, we've got a base in New Zealand and a base in Australia due to Covid and isolation, so we've probably had to do a little but more planning from that point of view.
